Community

Community… There are times I have spasms of loneliness… bouts of panic at my isolation.  I crave friends… friends that go beyond the virtual… the email… the chat… the comment here and there on my blog.  Someone I can have lunch with, compare trials and triumphs… someone that gets what I am, gets that even though Master is human and sometimes frighteningly imperfect and I struggle with impatience and panic at times, he is still my Master.  And when these feelings rise up, I go out… out into ‘the community’, trying to find a place where I fit in, feel comfortable…

Perhaps I am looking all the wrong places.  I am not really one of them… not a player… not young… I don’t go to munches or parties or sex clubs… I don’t play well with others.  I don’t even play with others. 

I went to a girl’s munch… charmingly called Sex In the City… after the TV show.  It was kind of nice, in that it was small.  But even in a relatively quiet bar, sitting at tables, I still had difficulty understanding others when they talked (fucking old ears) and when I did… it was about people I did not know and experiences I cannot have.  The merits of one party over another… who played with whom…

They were nice.  I did not feel unwelcome, but I just don’t feel like I have much in common with these women.  I seem to be the only monogamous, 24/7 slave at these places.  I am pretty sure I will go back a few more times.  But once again… I am not sure there is a place for a nonplayer in those sort of places. 

            

I have only gone to a few other munches.  But the few I have attended the little groups of cliques swirled and revolved around each other.  The conversations swirled and revolved around the same topics… who went to what party, who played with whom, what parties are good… Names of people I do not know, places I have not been… They all seem so caring but as I sit on the sidelines and watch the tides and eddies, I see the little dramas, the people included and others excluded… gossip and back stabbing as common as welcoming and tolerance.

Who and what are these kinksters?  Who are these people who go to these munches and parties?  People who seem to see and treat playing with others like I think of restaurants or bottles of wine.  Some you try once and never return; others that you return to over and over again.  They critique each other.  They display bruises and whisper about darker things. 

Yet to me, to surrender to the power of my Master… that is the most intimate of things.  It goes beyond sex.  In fact I think I could fuck a stranger a hell of a lot easier than I could ever let someone I met a few times at a bar tie me, hurt me, humiliate me.  It is beyond comprehension.  I could not enjoy it… I would never ever be able to relax, to let down my guard.    

And I see the relationships, the lists of people’s ‘leather families’ on Fetlife change with the seasons.  And I cannot help but wonder about the depth of something that is so mutable, so nebulous… wonder if it is a reflection of this appetite for the novelty rather than the comfort of the familiar that dooms these people to continually seek out new partners, new sensations.  I wonder if they find satisfaction or if this community isn’t a wasteland of broken hearts. 

I know that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of long term steady relationships but those people are not the ones I see.  I cannot help but wonder if I am looking in the right places.  Perhaps our Master’s keep all the other slaves too busy to go to frivolous girl munches… perhaps is it is really the single girls that you see out there… wandering restlessly from one brief, intense relationship to the next.